CHAMBERS ON COMMUNISM

Whittaker Chambers wrote a trenchant essay for Time (“Communists: Dr. Crankley’s Children”) in February 1948 commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto¹— Chambers was particularly intrigued by the success of Marx’s ideas despite historical developments which disproved Dr.

He assumed, for example, that the spectacular poverty of industrial workers of his day would spread and deepen. The capitalist philosophers, who predicted rising living standards, were right.⁷⁷

Adapting German philosopher G. F. Hegel's “dialectical method,” and respect for the state, Marx saw history as class conflicts (“thesis and antithesis”) whose final “synthesis” would result in a classless society.⁷⁸ The life and character of Marx, Chambers argued, contained the “ingredients”—pity, hate, desire for power—of Marxism's emotional force.⁷⁹ Reflecting the “morals” of Marx's atheistic dialectic, Chambers notes, fronts and purges soon followed.

Marx created the first Communist front organization. When the revolutions of 1848 swept Europe, he organized a workers' club in Paris whose agitators had instructions not to mention Communism, but to emphasize democracy. Later, Marx sent 300 agents into Germany with instructions to organize Communist cells but to appear as good, hard-working liberals. In 1848 Marx himself revived the old Rheinische Zeitung; its masthead now proclaimed it an “organ of democracy.” Admitted Marx: “It was in reality nothing but a plan of war against democracy.” Marx also conducted the first Party purges. He denounced anyone who disagreed with him as an “unscientific socialist.” The usual instrument of execution was slander, from stories that the accused had embezzled workers' funds to rumors that he had gonorrhea.⁸⁰

Marx despised the slow progress of “sentimental socialism.” Eventually he began to speak

more and more of the necessity of “capturing” the state (with its police power) rather than of “destroying” the state, as other socialists hoped to do.

Chambers described Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov— Lenin—as the leader of that “most terrible in the Marxist brood...who inherited the cold, disciplined logic necessary for the pursuit of power.”⁸² Lenin made this pathognomonic comment on religion in a November 1913 letter:

Every religious idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness...of the most dangerous kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds acts of violence and physical contagions.are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of God decked out in the smartest “ideological” costumes.. Every defense or justification of God, even the most refined, the best intentioned, is a justification of reaction.⁸³

A Lenin dictum, Chambers observes,⁸⁴ was: “The people themselves do not know what is good or bad for them.” Predictably, in 1917, he kidnapped the Russian state, and carnage ensued.

When the Russian people, without his help, snatched at democracy, he snatched it away from them. Like Father Marx, he knew what was best. He organized riots that weakened and, finally, a coup that overpowered the Kerensky government. He organized, as Marx had taught, a dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e., a disciplined little gang of power monopolists).⁸⁵

Thus, regarding Lenin, Chambers reminds us, “In his name...more men have been slaughtered than in Attila's.”⁸⁶

When Chambers broke with the Communist Party just before Christmas, 1938, he offered this litany of “political mistakes and crimes of the Communist Party” to his then collaborator in Soviet espionage, Alger Hiss, as justification:

the Soviet Government’s deliberate murder by mass starvation of millions of peasants in the Ukraine and the Kuban [Southern Russia surrounding the Kuban River, on the Black Sea between the Don Steppe, Volga Delta, and the Caucasus]; the deliberate betrayal of the German working class to Hitler by the Communist Party’s refusal to cooperate with Social Democrats against the Nazis; the ugly fact that the German Communist Party had voted in the Reichstag with the Nazis against the Social Democrats; the deliberate betrayal of the Spanish Republican government, which the Soviet Government was only pretending to aid, while the Communists massacred their political enemies in the Spanish prisons.

Chambers soon came to understand that even the internecine violence of the Stalinist purges was consistent with the horrific logic—and quintessential evil—of Communism:

The human horror of the Purge was too close for me to grasp clearly its historical meaning. I could not have said then, what I knew shortly afterwards, that, as Communists, Stalin and the Stalinists were absolutely justified in making the Purge. From the Communist viewpoint, Stalin could have taken no other course, so long as he believed he was right. The Purge, like the Communist-Nazi pact later on, was the true measure of Stalin as a revolutionary statesman. That was the horror of the Purge—that acting as a Communist, Stalin had acted rightly. In that fact lay the evidence that Communism is absolutely evil. The human horror was not evil, it was the sad consequence of evil. It was Communism that was evil, and the more truly a man acted in its spirit and interest, the more certainly he perpetuated evil.⁸⁸

Stalin, Chambers reiterates, simply personified worse evil—“the greatest of fascist forms”—Communism:

The point was not that Stalin is evil, but that Communism is more evil, and that, acting through his person, it found its supremely logical manifestations. The important point was not the character of Stalin, but the character of Communism, which, with an intuitive grasp that was at once the source of his strength and his mandate to power, Stalin was carrying to its inevitable development as the greatest of fascist forms.⁸⁹

Indeed, “despite occasional pious statements to the contrary,”⁹⁰ Chambers explained, the Communist Party functioned as a terrorist organization.

Its disclaimers are for the record. But its record of kidnappings, assassinations, and murders makes the actions of the old Terror Brigade of the Socialist Revolutionary Party [the underground brigade of the Socialist Revolutionary Party which carried out political assassinations in the early twentieth century] look merely romantic. No argument can reach the Communist Party unless it sees in it some self-serving advantage.

When Chambers, as an ex-Communist, met former Soviet spy General Walter Krivitsky, who by then had also renounced Communism (and was assassinated not long afterward), Krivitsky asked him, “Is the Soviet Government a fascist government?”⁹² Chambers, despite “all the emotions that had ever bound me to Communism [which] rose in a final spasm to stop my mouth,” answered, “Yes—the Soviet government is a fascist government.”⁹³ Krivitsky believed that an early turning point had occurred—the internal revolt during the Bolshevik Revolution by sailors from the Kronstadt naval base, “sons of peasants” embodying the Russian people's “instinctive surge for freedom”⁹⁴— Communism then “morphing” by its brutal repression of the uprising, into a malevolent fascism.

When they [the sailors] saw that Communism meant terror and tyranny, they called for the overthrow of the Communist Government and for a time imperiled it. They were bloodily destroyed or sent into Siberian slavery by Communist troops led in person by the Commissar of War, Leon Trotsky, and by Marshall Tukhachevsky, one of whom was later assassinated, the other executed, by the regime they then saved.⁹⁵

But Chambers saw still-deeper origins: “The fascist character of Communism was inherent in it from the beginning. Kronstadt changed the fate of millions of Russians. It changed nothing about Communism. It merely disclosed its character.”⁹⁶

Chambers, in Cold Friday,— a collection of writings composed after Witness, till a few weeks before his death, returns to the discussion of “the crux of Communism”—dialectical materialism⁹⁸—which he maintains the West fails to understand, at its peril.

This is the fact which absolutely sunders the mind of the Communist from the traditional mind of the West—which makes him in the mass a new breed in history. For our breeds, in this sense, are defined by the view we hold, unconsciously or not, of the world and its meaning, and the meaning of our lives in it.

Unable or unwilling to perceive this profound difference, Chambers argues, the West engages in “puzzling,” if not “merely stupid” cultural exchanges with Communism, “which in the next breath it condemns as a barbaric and criminal force,”¹⁰⁰ harboring the illusion that Communism and its votaries

are about to undergo a change of mind (or heart) so that henceforth they will no longer act like Communists; they will be like us.¹⁰¹

Chambers then elaborates what he believes is Communism’s “chief power in the West”¹⁰²—not Fifth Column subversion, as dangerous as that remains—but

the power of Communism to manipulate responsive sections of the West to check, counteract, paralyze, or confuse the rest. Those responsive sections of the West were not Communist, and never had been. Most of the minds that composed them thought of themselves as sincerely anti-Communist. Communism manipulated them, not in terms of Communism, but in terms of the shared historical crisis—peace and social justice being two of the workable terms. They were free to denounce Communism and Communists (and also anti­Communists) after whatever flourishes their intellectual innocence or arrogance might choose. Communism asked no more. It cared nothing, at this point, about motives. It cared about results.¹⁰³

Chambers recognized the burgeoning of Communist power as being inexplicable

except as Communism appeals to the divided mind of the West, making each of its advances exactly along the line of the West's internal division, paralyzing each effort of the West to cope with it by touching some sympathetic nerve. The success of Communism...is never greater than the failure of all other faiths.¹⁰⁴

Through an involuntary process, borne of despair, Chambers ultimately rejected as illusions the Communist “mirage of Almighty Mind and its power to plan human salvation.”¹⁰⁵ Chambers’s memorable description of this epiphany in Witness makes plain that from the outset his concerns extended beyond simply rejecting Communism.

What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind—the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step.. What I sensed without being able to phrase it was what has since been phrased with the simplicity of an axiom: “Man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God man can only organize the world against man.” The gas ovens of Buchenwald and the Communist execution cellars exist first within our minds.¹⁰⁶

But even in the midst of this deeply religious experience, Chambers acknowledges his own indebtedness to reason—evident in the brilliant works he produced during the twenty-three years after renouncing Communism.

[T]he torrent that swept through me in 1937 and the first months of 1938 swept my spirit clear to discern one truth: “Man without mysticism is a monster.” I do not mean, of course, that I denied the usefulness of reason and knowledge. What I grasped was that religion begins at the point where reason and knowledge are powerless and forever fail—the point at which man senses the mystery of his good and evil, his suffering and his destiny as a soul in search of God. Thus, in pain, I learned the distinction between wisdom and knowledge—knowledge, which however exalted, is seldom more than the making of careful measurements, and wisdom, which includes knowledge, but also includes man’s mystery.¹⁰⁷

Chambers cites a casual occurrence—focusing his gaze on the “delicate convolutions” of his young daughter’s ear—which in turn begot an “involuntary and unwanted” thought that led him,¹⁰⁸ ultimately, away from Communism’s fanatical atheism, to a religious acceptance of belief in God.

those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: “No those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.”¹⁰⁹